For those of you who didn’t have Tim Walz in your vice-presidential pool, here’s another chance for you.
Raise your hand if you had swiftboating on your “how desperate can Trump get in this mondo bizarro presidential campaign” bingo card?
I’ll confess I didn’t, although I now realize I should have guessed it as soon as Walz’s name was announced and Democrats began loudly touting his 24-year tenure in the National Guard, which he joined at the age of 17.
Of course, he’d be swiftboated — for the same reason that the Trump forces are busily race-baiting and slutshaming Kamala Harris.
Suddenly the race, which Donald Trump thought he had locked up before Joe Biden dropped out, looks to be tied again, with Harris even marginally ahead in most recent polls. And Walz, meanwhile, has had the kind of rollout that JD Vance could only have dreamed of.
And since the Trump team doesn’t seem to know what to do about it, they’re desperately searching through the playbook they had used to get them this far.
As we’ve been reminded, Chris LaCivita, co-chair of the Trump election campaign, was a driving force behind the reprehensible, if all-too-successful, swiftboating of John Kerry back in 2004 when George W. Bush’s campaign tried to turn Kerry’s service in Vietnam — where he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts — into scandal.
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It won’t work this time for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that in 2004, when the Iraq war was raging, the candidates’ respective military service during the Vietnam war became a central issue.
It’s a different time obviously — even Republicans, and especially Trump, don’t approve of the Iraq war any more — and if it seems like an old, tired strategy, that’s because it is.
And Democrats, including Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, the Army Ranger who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, are busily reminding everyone just how ugly and retrograde the swiftboating strategy looks.
“We’re not going to allow this to happen,” Crow said on a Democratic National Committee call, joined by other members of Congress who are military vets. “We’re going to defend one of our own because it’s not OK.”
Crow then moved to Twitter (OK, X) to take on JD Vance, who is apparently taking a break from attacking childless cat ladies and photo-bombing Air Force Two to lead the swiftboating forces in attacking Walz.
And, of course, Crow also came after Trump, whose relationship to military service is, uh, slightly problematic.
In one tweet, Crow wrote, “Let’s get something straight: denigrating a veteran’s service when your running mate *checks notes* dodged the draft, called veterans ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ and refused to honor fallen WW1 soldiers to avoid getting rained on isn’t just weird. It’s a flat out disgrace.”
In another, he put it this way: “We’re starting to see a pattern here. Turning on your own fellow veteran for political gain is … kind of like turning on your beliefs to be the running mate for a man you once described as a ‘moral disaster.’”
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Other Democratic veterans, including Pete Buttigieg and Mark Kelly, made similar cases in defense of Walz. If Kerry didn’t answer the charges against him quickly enough, Democrats seemed to have learned the lesson.
The case against Walz begins with the fact that he retired from the Guard two months before his unit was informed it would deploy to Iraq. He was running for Congress at the time, and the decision to retire after 24 years, several veterans remember, was very difficult for him.
But it became an issue when two colleagues who served with Walz charged that he had effectively deserted his post. That the charge came when Walz was running for governor by two vets who disagreed with his politics is probably worth considering.
The second point is that there is a video of Walz as governor speaking in support of gun-safety laws. He told a crowd that “we can make sure these weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
Walz did not serve in a war zone, but he did teach the use of weapons of war, including artillery. Does that make him guilty of “stolen valor” or was he just trying to make a point that he understood the danger of, say, assault-style weapons?
But Vance, who did serve in Iraq as a Marine “combat correspondent,” blasted Walz, saying, “What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq, and he has not spent a day in a combat zone? What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage.”
Some Republicans also say they’re bothered by the fact that Walz has described his rank as command sergeant major when he actually retired as a master sergeant. But, in fact, he was a command sergeant major in the Guard, but apparently retired before finishing coursework for the position.
OK, there’s some smoke — there usually is — but does anyone see a dumpster fire here?
If you think the charges reek of desperation, just listen to how Trump, in his rambling news conference the other day, described Walz — as a “radical man that is — he has done things that — he has positions that are not even possible to believe that they exist. He is going for things nobody has ever heard of. Heavy into the transgender world. Heavy into lots of different worlds.”
Weird, huh?
It got weirder when he turned to Harris, or maybe you didn’t hear Trump’s Willie Brown story. Harris used to date Brown, the powerful California Democrat. She was single at the time and he was very publicly separated from his wife.
And when Trump wasn’t talking about transgender heaviness or delusionally calling his January 6 crowd bigger than the MLK crowd for the March on Washington or charging that Harris wasn’t smart enough to hold a news conference, he moved on to the story of a harrowing helicopter ride he shared with Brown.
Trump said the helicopter had to make an emergency landing and that, “We maybe thought this was the end.” And at the time, he recalled Brown telling him “terrible things” about Harris.
Trump’s story continues: “And Willie was, he was a little concerned. So, I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years, but he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he — he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he — he was not a fan of hers very much at that point.”
Couple of problems with the story. The helicopter ride was with then California Gov. Jerry Brown, not former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, who later said he’d never been in a helicopter with Trump. Current Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was in the helicopter that day, said there was no emergency landing and “no discussion of Kamala Harris.”
And then there’s this: Trump called the Times to argue that the helicopter story was true. According to a story in Politico, though, Trump might have been in the helicopter with Nate Holden — a former Los Angeles city council member who, like Willie Brown, is Black. Holden said he was the one in a helicopter, in the late 1990s, with Trump when it nearly crashed.
In other words, the Willie Brown story holds up about as well as the swiftboating story.
Here’s an idea: Maybe it’s time to try something new.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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